“That gives me half the bloody Iraqi High Command, the top fifty in the Ba’ath Party, and John Doe’s cousin Fred,” growled Kobi Dror.
Alfonso Benz Moncada ran Jericho for two years, and the product was pure gold. It concerned politics, conventional weapons, military progress, changes of command, armaments procurement, rockets, gas, germ warfare, and two attempted coups against Saddam Hussein. Only on Iraq’s nuclear progress was Jericho hesitant. He was asked, of course. It was under deep secrecy and known only to the Iraqi equivalent of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar. To press too hard would be to invite exposure, he reported.
In the autumn of 1989 Jericho told Tel Aviv that Gerry Bull was under suspicion and under surveillance in Brussels by a team from the Iraqi Mukhabarat. The Mossad, who were by then using Bull as another source for progress on Iraq’s rockets program, tried to warn him as subtly as they could. There was no way they would tell him to his face what they knew—it would be tantamount to telling him they had an asset high in Baghdad, and no agency will ever blow away an asset like that.
So the katsa controlling the substantial Brussels station had his men penetrate Bull’s apartment on several occasions through the autumn and winter, leaving oblique messages by rewinding a videotape, changing wineglasses around, leaving a patio window open, even placing a long strand of female hair on his pillow.
The gun scientist became worried all right, but not enough. When Jericho’s message concerning the intent to liquidate Bull came through, it was too late. The hit had been carried out.
Jericho’s information gave the Mossad an almost-complete picture of Iraq in the buildup to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. What he told them about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction confirmed and amplified the pictorial evidence that had been passed over to them by Jonathan Pollard, by then sentenced to life in prison.
Bearing in mind what it knew and what it assumed America must also know, the Mossad waited for America to react. But as the chemical, nuclear, and bacteriological preparations in Iraq progressed, the torpor in the West continued, so Tel Aviv stayed silent.
Two million dollars had passed from the Mossad to the numbered account of Jericho In Vienna by August 1990. He was expensive, but he was good, and Tel Aviv decided he was worth it. Then the invasion of Kuwait took place, and the unforeseen happened. The United Nations, having passed the resolution of August 2 calling on Iraq to withdraw at once, felt it could not continue to support Saddam by maintaining a presence in Baghdad. On August 7, the Economic Commission for West Asia was abruptly closed down, and its diplomats recalled.
Benz Moncada was able to do one last thing before his departure. He left a message in a drop telling Jericho that he was being expelled and contact was now broken. However, he might return, and Jericho should continue to scan the places where the chalk marks were put. Then he left. The young Chilean was extensively debriefed in London until there was nothing left he could tell David Sharon.
Thus Kobi Dror was able to lie to Chip Barber with a straight face. At the time, he was not running an asset in Baghdad. It would be too embarrassing to admit that he had never discovered the traitor’s name and that now he had even lost contact. Still, as Sami Gershon had made plain, if the Americans ever found out ... In hindsight, perhaps he really should have mentioned Jericho.
Chapter 8
Mike Martin visited the tomb of Able Seaman Shepton in the cemetery of Sulaibikhat on the first of October and discovered the plea from Ahmed Al-Khalifa.
He was not particularly surprised. If Abu Fouad had heard of him, he had also heard of the steadily growing and spreading Kuwaiti resistance movement and its shadowy leading light. That they should eventually have to meet was probably inevitable.
In six weeks, the position of the Iraqi occupation forces had changed dramatically. In their invasion they had had a pushover, and they had begun their occupation with a sloppy confidence, assured that their stay in Kuwait would be as effortless as the conquest.
The looting had been easy and profitable, the destruction amusing, and the using of the womenfolk pleasurable. It had been the way of conquerors that went back to the days of Babylon.
Kuwait, after all, had been a fat pigeon ready for the plucking. But in six weeks, the pigeon had begun to peck and scratch. Over a hundred Iraqi soldiers and eight officers had either disappeared or been found dead. The disappearances could not all be explained by desertions. For the first time, the occupation forces were experiencing fear.
Officers no longer traveled in a single staff car but insisted on a truckload of escorting troops.
Headquarters buildings had to be guarded night and day, to the point where Iraqi officers had taken to firing over the heads of their sleeping sentries to wake them up.
The nights had become periods of no-go for anything less than a substantial troop movement. The roadblock teams huddled inside their redoubts when darkness fell. And still the mines went off, the vehicles burst into flame or seized up with ruined engines, the grenades were thrown, and the soldiers disappeared with cut throats into sewers or garbage dumps.
The escalating resistance had forced the High Command to replace the Popular Army with the Special Forces, good fighting troops who should have been at the front line in case the Americans came. Early October for Kuwait was not, to echo Churchill’s phrase, the beginning of the end, but it was the end of the beginning.
Martin had no means of replying to Al-Khalifa’s message when he read it in the graveyard, so it was not until the following day that he deposited his answer.
He agreed to meet, he said, but on his own terms. To have the advantage of darkness but to avoid the curfew at tenP.M. , he called for a meeting at half past seven. He gave exact directions as to where Abu Fouad should park his car and the small grove of trees where he would meet. The place he indicated was in the district of Abrak Kheitan, close to the main highway from the city to the now shattered and unused airport.
Martin knew it to be an area of traditional stone-built houses with flat roofs. On one of those roofs he would be waiting for two hours before the rendezvous to see if the Kuwaiti officer was being followed and if so by whom: his own bodyguards, or the Iraqis. In a hostile environment, the SAS officer was still at large and in combat because he took no chances, none at all.
He knew nothing of Abu Fouad’s concept of security and was not prepared to assume it was brilliant.
He established the meeting for the evening of the seventh and left his reply beneath the marble slab.
Ahmed Al-Khalifa retrieved it on the fourth.
* * *
Dr. John Hipwell would never have been taken during a casual meeting for a nuclear physicist, let alone one of those scientists who spent his working days behind the massive security of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston designing plutonium warheads for the soon-to-be-fitted Trident missiles.
A passing observer would have assumed he was a bluff Home Counties farmer, more at home leaning wisely over a pen of fat lambs at the local market than supervising the cladding of lethal disks of plutonium in pure gold.
Although the weather was still mild when Hipwell reappeared before the Medusa Committee, he wore, as in August, his square-patterned shirt, wool tie, and tweed jacket. Without waiting to be asked, he used his big red hands to fill and tamp a briar pipe with shag tobacco before starting into his report. Sir Paul Spruce twitched his pointed nose in distaste and gestured for the air conditioning to be raised a notch.
“Well, gentlemen, the good news is that our friend Mr. Saddam Hussein does not have, an atomic bomb at his disposal. Not yet, not by a long chalk,” said Dr. Hipwell, as he disappeared into a cloud of pale blue smoke.
There was a pause while he attended to his personal bonfire. Perhaps, Terry Martin mused, if you risk collecting a lethal dose of plutonium rays every day, the occasional pipe of tobacco does not really matter. Dr. Hipwell glanced at his notes.
“Iraq has been on the tr
ail of her own nuclear bomb since the mid-1970s, when Saddam Hussein really came to power. It seems to be the man’s obsession. In those years Iraq bought a complete nuclear reactor system from France—which was not bound by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968—for that very purpose.”
He sucked contentedly and tamped the glowing brushfire at the top of his pipe once again. Drifting embers settled onto his notes.
“Forgive me,” said Sir Paul. “Was this reactor for the purpose of generating electricity?”
“Supposed to be,” agreed Hipwell. “Absolute rubbish, of course, and the French knew it. Iraq has the third-largest oil deposits in the world. They could have had an oil-fired power station for a fraction of the price. No, the point was to fuel the reactor with low-grade uranium, called yellowcake or caramel, that they could persuade people to sell them. After use in a reactor, the end-product is plutonium.”
There were nods around the table. Everyone knew that the British reactor at Sellafield created electricity for the power grid and spewed out the plutonium that went to Hipwell for his warheads.
“So the Israelis went to work,” said Hipwell. “First one of their commando teams blew up the huge turbine at Toulon before it was shipped, setting the project back two years. Then in 1981, when Saddam’s precious Osirak 1 and 2 plants were about to start up, Israeli fighter-bombers swept in and blew the lot to kingdom come. Since then, Saddam has never succeeded in buying another reactor. After a short while, he stopped trying.”
“Why the hell did he do that?” asked Harry Sinclair from his end of the table.
“Because he changed direction,” said Hipwell with a broad smile, like one who has solved a crossword puzzle in record time. “Up until then, he was pursuing the plutonium road. With some success, by the way. But not enough. Yet—”
“I don’t understand,” said Sir Paul Spruce. “What is the difference between a plutonium-based and a uranium-based atomic bomb?”
“Uranium is simpler,” said the physicist. “Look, there are various radioactive substances that can be used for a chain reaction, but for your simple, basic, effective atom bomb, uranium’s the ticket. That’s what Saddam has been after since 1982—a basic uranium-based bomb. He hasn’t got there yet, but he’s still trying, and he’ll get there one day.”
Hipwell sat back with a broad beam, as if he had settled the enigma of the Creation. Like most of those around the table, Spruce was still perplexed.
“If he can buy this uranium for his destroyed reactor, why can’t he make a bomb with it?” he asked.
Hipwell pounced upon the question like a farmer on a bargain.
“Different kinds of uranium, my dear man. Funny stuff, uranium. Very rare. From a thousand tons of uranium ore, all you get is a block the size of a cigar box. Yellowcake. It’s called natural uranium, with an isotope number of 238. You can power an industrial reactor with it, but not make a bomb. Not pure enough. For a bomb you need the lighter isotope, uranium-235.”
“Where does that come from?” asked Paxman.
“It’s inside the yellowcake. In that one cigar-box-size block there is enough uranium-235 to stick under one fingernail without discomfort. The devil is getting the two separated. It’s called isotope separation.
Very difficult, very technical, very expensive, and very slow.”
“But you said Iraq is getting there,” pointed out Sinclair.
“He is, but he’s not there yet,” said Hipwell. “There’s only one viable way of purifying and refining the yellowcake to the required ninety-three percent pure. Years ago, in the Manhattan Project, your chaps tried several methods. They were experimenting, see? Ernest Lawrence tried one way, Robert Oppenheimer tried another. In those days they used both methods in complementary fashion and created enough uranium-235 to make Little Boy.
“After the war the centrifuge method was invented and slowly perfected. Nowadays only this method is used. Basically, you put the feedstock into a thing called a centrifuge, which spins so fast that the whole process has to be done in a vacuum or the bearings would turn to jelly. Slowly the heavier isotopes, the ones you don’t want, are drawn to the outer wall of the centrifuge and bled off. What’s left is a little bit purer than when you started. Just a little bit. You have to do it over and over again, thousands of hours, just to get a wafer of bomb-grade uranium the size of a postage stamp.”
“But he is doing it?” pressed Sir Paul.
“Yep. Been doing it for about a year. These centrifuges ... to save time we link them in series, called cascades. But you need thousands of centrifuges to make up a cascade.”
“If they’ve been going down that road since 1982, why has it taken so long?” asked Terry Martin.
“You don’t go into the hardware store and buy a uranium gas diffusion centrifuge off the shelf,” Hipwell pointed out. “They tried at first but were turned down—the documents show that. Since 1985 they have been buying the component parts to build their own on-site. They got about five hundred tons of basic uranium yellowcake, half of it from Portugal. They bought much of the centrifuge technology from West Germany—”
“I thought Germany had signed a whole range of international agreements limiting the spread of nuclear bomb technology,” protested Paxman.
“Maybe they have. I wouldn’t know about the politics,” said the scientist. “But they got the bits and pieces from all over the place. You need designer lathes, special ultrastrong maraging steel, anticorrosion vessels, special valves, high-temperature furnaces called ‘skull’ furnaces because that’s what they look like, plus vacuum pumps and bellows—this is serious technology we are talking about. Quite a bit, plus the know-how, came from Germany.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Sinclair. “Has Saddam got any isotope separation centrifuges working yet?”
“Yes, one cascade. It’s been functioning for about a year. And another one is coming on stream soon.”
“Do you know where all this stuff is?”
“The centrifuge assembly plant is at a place called Taji—here.” The scientist passed a large aerial photo over to the American and circled a series of industrial buildings.
“The working cascade seems to be underground somewhere not far from the old wrecked French reactor at Tuwaitha, the reactor they called Osirak. I don’t know whether you’ll ever find it with a bomber—it’s certainly underground and camouflaged.”
“And the new cascade?”
“No idea,” said Hipwell. “Could be anywhere.”
“Probably somewhere else,” suggested Terry Martin. “The Iraqis have been practicing duplication and dispersal ever since they put all their eggs in one basket and the Israelis blew the basket away.”
Sinclair grunted.
“How sure are you,” asked Sir Paul, “that Saddam Hussein cannot have his bomb yet?”
“Very,” said the physicist. “It’s a question of time. He hasn’t had long enough. For a basic but usable atomic bomb, he will need thirty to thirty-five kilograms of pure uranium-235. Starting cold a year ago, even assuming the working cascade can function twenty-four hours a day—which it can’t—a spinning program needs at least twelve hours per centrifuge. You need a thousand spins to get from zero percent pure to the required ninety-three percent. That’s five hundred days of spinning. But then there’s cleaning, servicing, maintenance, breakdowns. Even with a thousand centrifuges operating in a cascade now and for the past year, you’d need five years. Bring in another cascade next year—shorten it to three years.”
“So he won’t have his thirty-five kilograms until 1993 at the earliest?” interjected Sinclair.
“No, he can’t.”
“One final question: If he gets the uranium, how much longer to an atomic bomb?”
“Not long. A few weeks. You see, a country undertaking to make its own bomb will have the nuclear engineering side running in parallel. Bomb engineering is not all that complicated, so long as you know what you are doing. And Jaafar does—he will
know how to build one and trigger it. Dammit, we trained him at Harwell. But the point is, on a time-scale alone, Saddam Hussein cannot have enough pure uranium ready yet. Ten kilograms, tops. He’s three years short, minimum.”
Dr. Hipwell was thanked for his weeks of analysis, and the meeting ended.
Sinclair would return to his embassy and write up his copious notes, which would go to the United States in heavy code. There they would be compared with the analyses of the American counterparts—physicists drawn from the laboratories of Sandia, Los Alamos, and principally Lawrence Livermore in California, where for years a secret section called simply Department Z had been monitoring the steady spread of nuclear technology around the world on behalf of the State Department and the Pentagon.
Though Sinclair could not know it, the findings of the British and American teams would confirm each other to a remarkable degree.
Terry Martin and Simon Paxman left the same meeting and wandered across Whitehall in the benign October sunshine.
“Quite a relief,” said Paxman. “Old Hipwell was quite adamant. Apparently the Americans agree entirely. That bastard is nowhere near his atom bomb yet. One less nightmare to worry about.”
They parted at the corner, Paxman to cross the Thames toward Century House, Martin to cross Trafalgar Square and head up St. Martin’s Lane toward Gower Street.
Establishing what Iraq had, or even probably had, was one thing. Finding out precisely where it was situated was another. The photography went on and on. The KH-11s and KH-12s drifted across the heavens in endless sequence, photographing what they saw on the Iraqi land beneath them.
By October, another device had entered the skies, a new American reconnaissance plane so secret that Capitol Hill did not know about it. Code-named Aurora, it flew on the fringes of inner space, reaching speeds of Mach 8, almost five thousand miles per hour, riding its own fireball—the ramjet effect—far beyond Iraqi radar or interceptor missiles. Not even the technology of the dying USSR could spot Aurora, which had replaced the legendary SR-71 Blackbird.